I suggested yesterday that if Labour loses control of Glasgow City Council in May's local elections that 'things can only get better' as far as the fight for equal pay is concerned.Now while I said that in a light-hearted way, I was also making a very serious point because I find it incredible that low paid workers in Glasgow are having to fight another big Labour-run council, tooth and nail, just to enforce their basic employment rights.The same was true in Labour-run North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire Councils, of course, where for years senior officials, elected politicians and (in some cases) the trade unions argued that their pay arrangements were not discriminatory.

Which proved to be nonsense, but thousands of low paid workers had to fight these Labour councils through the courts (in South Lanarkshire's case to the UK Supreme Court) for years and years before they finally admitted the game was up.So in that sense, Labour losing power in Glasgow would be a good thing if you ask me - a clear-out, as well as a clean-up, would do local democracy a power of good.For reasons known only to itself Glasgow City Council refuses to be open and transparent about its pay arrangementsand when that happens I always smell a rat.

A Change Is Gonna Come (05/03/17)

Kirsty has come up with an original entry to my Glasgow music competition with 'A Change Is Gonna Come' by Sam Cooke although this YouTube cover version is by a talented young man name of Zhi.A great song and I like the emphasis on the need for change because Glasgow City Council has been treating its workforce with contempt over equal pay for many years, if you ask me.In any event, the citizens of Glasgow will have their say in the next round of local council elections which is on Thursday 4th May 2017.Who knows what changes will come about after the elections, but (touch wood) if the current Labour administration loses control, let's hope it is a case of "Things Can Only Get Better".

Money's Too Tight to Mention (03/03/17)

Now this was submitted by Evelyn and I suspect it's a tongue-in-cheek reference to the City Council's stubborn reluctance to settle people's equal pay claims.

Councils are always pleading poverty, of course, despite the fact that during the 10 year period between 1997-2007 councils budgets across Scotland virtually doubled.Regular readers will be aware that Scottish councils had 'loadsamoney' to spend when they agreed to fully fund a special McCrone pay agreement for Scotland's school teachers in the year 2000 - which has cost the public purse £800 million every year since.And Glasgow City Council has paid out millions in 'golden goodbye' payments to senior officials including package worth £450,628 to its chief 'legal eagle' Ian Drummond.So it seems that if money really is too tight to mention in Glasgow, strangely that's only the case when it comes to the City Council facing up to its obligations over equal pay.

Glasgow Pay Bombshell (14/02/17)

Readers in Glasgow still fighting for equal pay will be interested to learn that the council employee with the largest remuneration package across the whole of the UK in 2010-11 was Glasgow City Council's very own Ian Drummond.

Now Ian Drummond was Glasgow's executive director of special projects at the time and according to the report below in The Telegraph the city council official received an eye watering sum of £450,628 that year including £109,000 for “compensation for loss of office” and £199,000 in pension contributions.

The Telegraph newspaper famously broke the story on MPs' expenses at Westminster and its story in April 2012 certainly appears to have touched a raw nerve with GCC's spokesman who said:

“With local government facing unprecedented cuts, we simply cannot sustain the number of staff we once had.

“If the Taxpayers' Alliance was genuinely interested in public finances, it would realise that these are not simply normal salary costs - they include a redundancy deal that will save the public purse £45 million every single year.”Now this is true, of course, because getting rid of highly paid senior officials did indeed save the council lots of money, but these individuals got what they were entitled to - they were not bullied or intimidated into accepting much less than they were due under redundancy and/or pension scheme regulations.

Yet compare how the city council's senior officials fared with the treatment meted out to equal pay claimants in the run-up to Christmas 2005.

On that occasion settlement payments were capped at just £9,000 (much less than they were really worth) and thousands of Glasgow's lowest paid workers were frightened into believing that they would 'lose everything', if they didn't accept the measly offer on the table.

Ian Drummond played a big role in Christmas 2005 'buy-out' exercise if I recall correctly, as the City's Council's head of legal at that time, known affectionately by his nickname - 'The Prince of Darkness'.

Speaking personally, I always regarded Ian Drummond was someone you could do business with and this proved to be so in the negotiations with A4ES which followed, resulting in much higher and fairer settlements for A4ES clients in Glasgow.

But the big question for Glasgow City Council in 2017 is:

"How come senior officials are treated so well when thousands of the council's lowest paid workers are still fighting for equal pay?"

A record number of council officials are paid over £100,000 a year, new figures show.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: 'It proves there is significant scope to save taxpayers’ money by tackling the culture of dodgy pay deals and boomerang bosses that was the norm under Labour' Photo: PA

The analysis from the TaxPayers’ Alliance showed the number of council workers receiving more than the Prime Minister last year jumped by 10 per cent.

The alliance found that more than 3,000 senior council executives pocketed pay and perks packages in excess of £100,000 in its annual town hall rich list.

In all 3,097 town hall employees were awarded deals worth six figure sums in 2010-11, a hike of 13 per cent on the previous year. The figure is a record for the six years that the list has been compiled.

The alliance also found that 880 received in total more than the Prime Minister’s £142,500 salary, up 13 per cent from 777 in the year before. It also found 658 staff took home between £150,000 and £249,999, while 52 broke the £250,000 mark.

The alliance said some of the packages included redundancy payments but insisted that did not “wholly account” for the increase in high payouts.

The council employee with the largest remuneration package in the UK was Ian Drummond, executive director of special projects who received £450,628, including £109,000 for “compensation for loss of office” during the year and £199,000 in pension contributions.

Top of the Rich List when redundancy packages were excluded was Geoff Alltimes, then chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham Council on £281,666.

Mr Alltimes no longer works for the council, which now shares the position of chief executive with another London council.

According to the study, the local authority with the most employees receiving more than £100,000 in 2010-11 was Barnet at 47 - something the council immediately claimed was untrue.

The report found Glasgow City Council had 25 members of staff with packages over £100,000, Cardiff City Council recorded 19 while Belfast City Council had just one.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TPA, said: “Taxpayers will be astonished that so many council employees are still getting such a generous deal while everyone else in the public sector is facing a pay freeze.

“The Town Hall Rich List shows that while councils insist cuts can only mean pressure on frontline services, some clearly have cash in the bank when it comes to paying their own senior staff.”

Top of the Rich List when redundancy packages were excluded was Geoff Alltimes, then chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham Council on £281,666.

Mr Alltimes no longer works for the council, which now shares the position of chief executive with another London council.

A Barnet Council spokesman said: “The number is wrong. The Taxpayers' Alliance is cross referencing two lists that don't contain the same information. The council had 25 staff, including interim staff, on total remuneration over £100,000.

“A further 16 appear on the list because of redundancy payments and another six are teaching staff. This number of teaching staff also includes redundancies.”

A Glasgow City Council spokesman said Mr Drummond had since left the council. A spokesman: “With local government facing unprecedented cuts, we simply cannot sustain the number of staff we once had.

“If the Taxpayers' Alliance was genuinely interested in public finances, it would realise that these are not simply normal salary costs - they include a redundancy deal that will save the public purse £45 million every single year.”

A Hammersmith and Fulham Council spokesman said its pursuit of value for money was “relentless” and sharing a chief executive with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was saving taxpayers £200,000 a year.

Government sources said most of the pay deals were agreed before the Coalition came into power, and ministers were trying to bear down on town hall pay.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: “It proves there is significant scope to save taxpayers’ money by tackling the culture of dodgy pay deals and boomerang bosses that was the norm under Labour.”

The alliance said it based its report on local authorities' 2010-11 annual statement of accounts and where salary bands were provided it used the midpoint.

Table note: 2010-11 remuneration is not limited to salary and also includes fees, allowances, expenses, compensation, employer pension contributions, election duties, benefits in kind, redundancy payments and other payments.

A kind reader has shared a response she received from Glasgow City Council after writing to its Labour leader, Councillor Frank McAveety.

Now Frank's been around the track once or twice so he must surely be embarrassed by the 'weasel words' which have been written on his behalf.For a start, Glasgow City Council is now the only council in Scotland not to have dealt with the so-called protection and pay assimilation period which followed the Workforce Pay and Benefits Review in 2007.

Neighbouring councils in North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire both recently resolved this issue, so there is no 'best use of public funds' or 'wider community interest' at stake here.

Which means that Glasgow is on the hook just like other councils, except Glasgow is 10 years late after refusing to deal with the issue at the time, i.e. back in 2007.So there is no dispute about whether or not a further 2nd Wave payment is required, the only issues are how much and over which time period?A4ES says the pay of the women's jobs should have been levelled up to the same as the men before the WPBR came into force in 2007 - in which case the women are entitled to the same level of pay protection as the men.Not just that, of course, since the WPBR has not been given a clean bill of health and Glasgow's local job evaluation scheme (the City Council refused to use the nationally approved scheme) forms part of the appeal to the Court of Session.The other glaring point Frank fails to mention is that thousands of low paid workers in Glasgow were made very poor offers of settlement in the run-up to Christmas 2005.Everyone caught up in that exercise (not the A4ES claimants) feel cheated and angry at the way they were treated - here's an extract from a recent post from the blog site (from 1 Feb) which explains the background and why people are so determined that they 'won't be fooled again'.Council 'buy-outs' - Christmas 2005

Lots of people are understandably still very angry at being pressurised into accepting very poor offers of settlement in the run-up to Christmas 2005. In plain language people felt they were bullied and intimidated into accepting these offers which were capped at a maximum of only £9,000 - because they were frightened into believing that they would probably lose everything, if they continued with their claims to the Employment Tribunals.

The role of the trade unions

The trade unions in Glasgow had agreed the £9,000 cap with the City Council and were left looking foolish when far higher settlements were achieved by Action 4 Equality Scotland. As a result, the trade unions in Glasgow (and elsewhere) lost credibility with their own members after siding with management and the employers over equal pay, which is why the vast majority of claimants in Glasgow (around 6,000) are now with A4ES.

As I said on the blog site recently, this may not have been down toFrank as he was an MSP in the Scottish Parliament in 2005, but the reality is that the buck stops with him now as Leader of the Council in 2017.The Council's response also says that both sides are 'talking' which is technically correct although Glasgow is dragging its feet quite shamelessly. For example, at the last meeting with A4ES on 19 January 2017 the Council claimed they were unable to provide pay information because of ongoing industrial action in their IT section.Embarrassingly, the industrial action ended that same day (19 Jan) which the Council clearly knew at the time, but still used this as a ridiculous excuse for not providing information which they had been promising to release for months. So if you ask me, it seems as if we are dealing with some cynical people who use weasel words when what's needed is some straight talking and a commitment to get the job done.

Cllr McAveety thanks you for your recent enquiry and has asked me to respond on his behalf.

A number of colleagues have written in about equal pay and have been asking when the Council will settle. In fact the Council settled equal pay in 2006. Unlike a good many other Councils all of these cases are now settled and the Council has had a pay and grading system in place that ensures equal treatment. This system has been tested twice in Court and has been approved each time.

The Council did not have a robust system of equal pay in place before 2006. It settled, quite rightly, those claims and put in place a robust system that made sure that this could not happen again. What is currently at issue is whether the Council should have put in place 3 years pay protection in 2006 for those whose income was due to fall. One Court supported this while another did not.

Both sides have appealed but they are also talking to each other. This is a complex issue and because public funds are at stake the Council does need to act in the best interest of the entire community. I hope, however, that before too long one of the first Councils to resolve the source issue will be able to resolve this final point.

About Me

Mark is an independent consultant with a wide range of clients in the public, private and 'not for profit' sectors - both in the UK and Europe.
In a previous life, Mark spent 20 years as a senior trade union official - latterly as Unison's Head of Local Government and Chief Negotiator in Scotland. Contact Mark by e-mail at: markirvine@compuserve.com